There’s a bit of intuition involved, but most “conspiracy theorists” are obsessive researchers who go down immense rabbitholes. They might draw completely erroneous conclusions by following a flawed train of logic, but they generally don’t jump to those conclusions.
Bret Weinstein - who has been branded a conspiracy theorist by the NYT - explained how it’s done, or tried to, after Scott Adams made a comment about anti-vaxers being right just by pure dumb luck.
I totally hear you, Finley. I would add, though, that there are also many people among conspiracy theorists (conspiracy factists, whatever they want to call themselves) who do jump to conclusions and (effectively) say to hell with research. There’s garden variety faulty logic, and then there’s so-called magical thinking. Just sayin’.
Not all of them 
I would argue that that’s exactly what THE Science community has been doing. When they start out lauding the CCP as being “open & transparent”, you can safely conclude they’ve said ‘to hell with research’. The beginning, middle, & ending of their thinking has been to protect the cultural image of their organization at all costs - logic, or what’s actually true, has never come into it.
I suppose we could come up with a taxonomy of conspiracy theorists:
I would suggest that 4 and 5 is what happened with the COVID narrative. 3 might have applied to politicians with degrees in history and ancient Greek.
The thing about being a common-or-garden conspiracy theorist is that you have to have some sort of theory. Otherwise you’re just a bar-room bullshitter. I was just reading something about the 9-11 conspiracy (I’m sure you’ve heard it - the allegation is that it was an inside job). The guy has done his research, and it turns out there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that, at best, there was some collusion with the authorities. I still don’t think the US would have deliberately taken down the towers themselves - my main objection is that,if there had been some intent to manufacture casus belli, a less deadly false-flag attack would have easily done the job. But it hangs together coherently and it certainly made me wonder if there may have been more to that than met the eye. He hadn’t just decided, without any apparent basis, that something extraordinary had happened. People who do that sort of thing (“The CIA have bugged my refrigerator”) are usually mentally ill, not just weird or stupid.
Then there’s the Seymour Hersch story about US involvement in the NordStream 2 “accident”. Does the US occasionally do things that are just completely irrational and are almost guaranteed to backfire?
We had the discussion on here about the 9-11 conspiracy and as with everything to be fair I joined that discussion with an open mind and asked “ok so what is the most irrefutable single fact you have that suggests a conspiracy?”.
Not to rehash that discussion but one event was brought up and when looked at in detail you could see the people pushing the theory were being deliberately deceptive, editing video tapes, ignoring expert testimony, twisting facts. At that point, to an unbiased person who is just trying to look at claims objectively, skepticism should start to lean towards the overall claims of some kind of conspiracy being false. Which as the discussion went on seemed to be the case for most of the claims.
I was thinking back to the 9-11 time too. Sometimes people have a pre-determined agenda and are very obviously driving the cart before the horse.
More recently, the 2020 election was filled with people constantly repeating disproved nonsense.
Sometimes the person’s attitude is revealing. If the presentation is basically that “this circumstantial evidence exists, what do you think”, great. If they’re more or less telling me it must be true, there’s a problem.
Yes, definitely 
I made this point a lot of times. The US was never notably a nation of Quakers
I applaud your effort, but taking a quick look i think missing for example the gullible, and the angry, and the paranoid. Some peoplenare going to be all 3!
In fairness, I know you didn’t worry about reliability or validity of sampling on which to base your hypothesis. This isn’t real research, it is posting stuff on the internet
I don’t know much about 9-11, but a related incident that followed a week after 9-11, the Anthrax terrorist attack, was a clear case of a real-life conspiracy on a major scale involving THE Science community, the military, the media, & politicians.
In short, according to the FBI, Bruce Ivins, a top bio-weapons/defense expert at Fort Detrick, mailed a series of anthrax laden letters to various media orgs & politicians. It killed 5 people. The letters were written in a style pretending to be from an Islamic terrorist front. His goal was to increase funding for bio-defense/weapons research, especially vaccines. A goal which was achieved beyond his wildest dreams. In fact there’s a direct lineage from that funding explosion right up to the GoF research that likely caused Covid.
Meanwhile, the Anthrax attack was used as justification for Iraq War 2 - to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s non-existent bio-weapons of mass destruction facilities - with US soldiers vaxxed-to-the-max with anthrax vaccines - now known as Gulf War Syndrome.
It was known within weeks, due to the Ames strain identified, that the anthrax used in the attack originated from Fort Detrick, but the bungling &/or corrupt FBI investigation (led by Robert Mueller) dragged on for 7 years. Ivins was even acting as the FBI’s expert advisor during that time - indeed he won the highest award the military can bestow on a civilian for his efforts.
Ultimately, Ivins suicided before he was charged, which is a pity, coz none of the victims’ families thought he was acting alone, but the case ended with his death.
This is an incident that presented an obvious red-flag to dangerous, unaccountable behaviour going on in the bio-security science community. Instead of precipitating an investigation into/reform of that out-of-control behaviour, it massively rewarded it.
It also re-enforced a tried & true blue-print: Deny/cover-up for as long as you can, then 5 years later no one will care about the details coz we’ve all moved on …
This is exactly what we are seeing today with Covid’s origin. It’s no coincidence.
You’re actually engaging in what I would call a classic conspiracy theory argument here. Yes, bad things happen, and conspiracies happen. That doesn’t mean anything that looks odd is a conspiracy. I won’t speak for anyone else, but if you want to convince me of something about Covid’s origin, you’ll need to provide evidence about that.
I can do that by describing my journey to becoming a Conspiracy Theorist in 3 simple steps:
When i saw that a super-contagious coronavirus broke out right-next-door to a lab engineering super-contagious coronaviruses, i grew suspicious. I researched the authors of the Pangolin Paper & The Lancet Statement - they all had huge China COIs. Huge.
When THE Science community responded to these suspicions with irrational name-calling/banning of anyone questioning the official origin, & began praising the CCP as “open & transparent”, i knew it must be a lab-exit. There’s no other possible reason for them doing that. Simple logic.
The FOI emails from the scientist who wrote the ridiculous Pangolin Paper (upon which everything that anyone thought, wrote, said, read re Covid being natural-origin is based) reveal that all of them thought it was lab-engineered! All of them. In fact the paper was purpose-written to cover-up Covid’s origin. Game over.
After ‘3’, i was waiting around to enjoy the high-profile trials of those most integrally involved - but i see now it’s not gonna happen. It’s like Cersei said: Knowledge is not power - Power is power.
Sure, we’ve been over that at length here.
You lose me here. I think a lab leak is likely for a lot of reasons, but, viruses do arise naturally. There’s no “must be” until it’s proven–again, that’s classic conspiracy theory thinking. As you will, but I’d stick to the facts.
You’re denying basic logic - a common failing of empiricism. What other possible reason could there be for vilifying/banning people asking legitimate questions about an event that reshaped the world? Unless you’re trying to cover something up? Remember at this stage it was only harmless questioning - yet it was met with over-the-top emotionalism/censorship. We can deduce why. If you’ve got a plausible alternative reason, then give it.
How about point ‘3’? The FOI emails.
No, I’m following basic logic. You are not however. If you want me to believe your purported cause for an event, demonstrate the cause. Don’t try to pull the “must have” flim-flam.
Lol. Practically all the things you’re saying scream, conspiracy theory. It’s the tactic of the person without evidence determined to make people believe them.
Congratulations. You made a deduction.
I don’t have to do that. If you want me to believe your deduction, provide evidence to support it. I find the evidence you’ve provided so far insufficient. If you don’t like that, I’m fine with leaving it there and let anyone reading decide as they may. As I’ve said, the baseline is that viruses are part of nature.
Is this what you’re talking about?
IMO that sort of question is unhelpful in these instances. It sets the bar too high - or, at least, it sets the bar in a position that’s subject to arbitrary dismissal. If, for the sake of argument, there was an actual conspiracy between smart and well-funded individuals, the conspirators would have made a lot of effort to conceal it, and they would have been mostly successful - unless, I suppose, they were so supremely arrogant they figured there was no need to do so. An indication of conspiracy can inform your hypothesis. But that’s as far as it gets you.
The next stage is to test you hypothesis by looking for facts that destroy it. In other words, can you find a verifiable fact that indicates the hypothesis cannot be true?
In the absence of falsification, I try to look at these things in terms of probability. How probable is it that the anomalies in the narrative (and there definitely are some) are a consequence of chance? I’m not particularly invested in the 9/11 thing and this isn’t the place to discuss it, so let’s pick something narrower, such as the blanket censorship of COVID naysayers and the destruction of doctors who spoke out against it, or who merely wanted to discuss it without mudslinging. Is there a benign explanation for that? I really don’t think so. There are many possible alternative explanations for it, but “the authorities were trying their best to protect the public” cannot possibly be one of them.
I was attempting to describe logical positions, not the reasons those positions have been taken. And yes, there is some overlap - it’s hard to draw a line between (3) and (4), for example. My point here was that some “conspiracy theorists” have a coherent theory that deserves to be taken seriously. In other words they have a hypothesis that is testable.
Some do, sure. Let’s not quibble over percentages 
Yes. There were very knowledgeable posters here, professionally skilled STEM types who knew that building 7 or whatever was taken down on purpose. Jesus, what an era to post on the flob.