You are not alone in this sentiment. It is beyond the pale that the denizens of a 'hacker forum' are often so narrow-minded when it comes to engaging those who think outside of the personal zone of ideological preference. The same people who have been yammering about the importance of 'diversity' are dead set against diversity of opinion. Grow up, folks, get outside your comfort zone and engage some of those deplorables, irredeemables, garbage, rednecks, hillbillies and bible thumpers instead of howling along with the masses. Go ahead and try, you may find they are more like you than you've been told by the chattering classes. Sure you'll have disagreements over certain things but that does not make them the evil monsters your moral mentors have been claiming they are. Just... grow up.
I’ve engaged with these people a good bit actually. They’re very normal people, in that they largely don’t know much about politics but have strong opinions.
Hacker News' eventual death started the moment it joined the hysteria over the Lab Leak Theory. Since then it has trended more and more to be like Reddit, with ideological tribal concerns occupying an increasingly large mindshare. This drives away people who want to have earnest conversations in good faith, giving even more power to the ideologues. It will be a long death spiral but you can see it happening day by day.
I've genuinely never seen "hysteria" from the people talking about the lab leak theory. The closest I've seen is from people who were extremely keen for no one to mention the theory. Not because of some cover-up, but I think just because that was what everyone was telling everyone else to do, hysteria-style.
The idea that the novel coronavirus didn't escape from the local coronavirus R&D laboratory never had anywhere near enough evidence to be credible.
It was pretty much the WHO simply repeating the claims of the Chinese government, who had already tried to cover up the outbreak (with any warnings sent to the WHO coming from Taiwan instead).
It was about as believable as the completely baseless claims that the emergency use authorised vaccine was safe and effective.
In this context, diversity refers to characteristics, not to differences of opinion. That said, diverse thinking can be valuable when used for prosocial purposes.
