people could dissent
But I don’t think this is how normies work. They don’t first believe the truth, then strategically decide to lie about it to keep in good standing with the high-status people, then when you ask them anonymously revert to their true belief.
No, they don’t look for truth at all. They look for what the high-status tribal belief is, then they go and believe that honestly and earnestly.
This is why we needed a 500k+ word sequence of blog posts to teach people what truth even is.
There is a risk that such a survey includes Peter Daszak and his friends and collaborators, who may have been the ones responsible for the covid-19 lab leak.
Or, that it includes people who have been influenced by Daszak via spreading false information and so on, or are collaborators or are otherwise incentivized to lie for personal and career advancement. The field is small enough that personal relationships are essential to getting funded, hired, published and so on.
Plus, there are effects like information cascades and respectability cascades; everyone updates towards the more respectable opinion rather than the true one. And surveys like this are part of that effect.
I personally think that the chance that covid-19 was created in a lab in Wuhan is exceptionally high, perhaps 93%, and there are various skeptical experts who think it is now beyond reasonable doubt that the Wuhan Lab created covid-19.
As such I would label this entire exercise as mistake, akin to asking a sample of organized criminals whether organized crime is a problem in their area, and having 90% of them saying it isn’t.