I agree with the rest of the post, its hard to say one way or another if octopuses believe in conspiracy theories, and the conclusion drawn seems, at best, orthogonal to the data presented.
But I disagree with what you said here:
>But do they hold beliefs that are not true about things they don't understand well? (the basic building block of a conspiracy theory)
Facilely, this is a tautology. Everyone necessarily holds untrue beliefs about things they incompletely understand. The scientific method taught to school children is a framework for identifying and removing them. Your statement is akin to "the fundamental building block of conspiracy theories is knowledge gained from empirical observation"
But less glibly, untrue beliefs held by individuals with incomplete understanding are insufficient building blocks of conspiracy theories. The issue doesn't arise from incomplete understanding, nor is it dismissed by efforts to expand understanding. You need an untrue belief, certainly, but you also need to approach that belief with a confirmation bias.
That's why I drew attention to the confirmation bias portion of it.
Very intelligent people still buy into conspiracy theories, and its always the same: the conspiracy theory lies about certain things, so as to preserve the illusion of the truth in other things.
The lab leak conspiracy theory mainly appeals to the audience's desire that bad things be, in principle, preventable. Take that away, and people end up feeling like they have less control over their own safety, which is considerably more troubling than just the fear of some disease.
We should not try to understand any given conspiracy theory in the context of "what information are people getting wrong?", because (like I said previously), everyone, regardless of intelligence, will always be wrong about something. We should instead try to understand why the conspiracy theory is more emotionally satisfying than the truth.
Lab leak is such a bad example here since it's now officially considered the most probable explanation. Labeling something as a conspiracy theory especially when the explanation is the simplest and most probable explanation just screams politics or groupthink. A lot of conspiracy theories are just plain true but they get labeled as questionable because it goes against official narratives, interests, etc or are associated with kooky people. Well that's how the world works I guess.
I am completely unable to find any official source claiming that the lab-leak hypothesis was more credible than the wet-market zoonotic transmission hypothesis. Can you provide some support on that front?
The closest I get to an official US position is the "summary" of hearings from the House Oversight Committee, as published on oversight.house.gov. But the way that report is written (and the way the whole of the website is structured) casts a pretty dark shadow on the reliability of the whole thing (at the bottom of the page, there's some quick links that are, verbatim "Press Releases, The Overview, Biden Family Investigation, The Bidens’ Influence Peddling Timeline, Biden's Border Crisis, COVID Origins". Considering that Biden impeachment hearings around some of that have been repeatedly rebuffed by republicans, the fact that those are on the main page reveals a pretty seriously bias.
The WHO is pretty silent on the subject, as is the CDC and the NIH. This makes sense, both within and without the conspiracy theory context, so the silence is not damning for either conclusion.
More tellingly, the closest I get from the scientific literature is that we cannot definitively rule out a leak as the cause, but that's adequately explained by the Chinese government's historic silence on internal issues. That silence is not an argument in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. If the PRC had been an open book about everything else, but suddenly clammed up about the origins of COVID 19, then I guess, sure, but even then, more "open" governments have denied more over less damage.
That's pretty much how it goes for every piece of "evidence" that supports the lab-leak hypothesis: the whole thing is based on circumstantial evidence that is most readily interpreted as innocent or inconclusive. For instance, its true that 3 scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill with an unidentified respiratory illness in December 2019. But only 3, while quite a few more people became ill around the wet market. Sure, the scientists could've become ill at the lab, then carried it to the wet market. But why didn't more at the lab become ill? The simpler explanation is that the scientists went to the wet market in the city they lived in, and were exposed to the virus there.
And this is all for the best-supported version of the lab-leak hypothesis, that does not assume deliberate weaponization via genetic engineering or anything of that sort.
The point I'm making here is that while the conspiracy theory is the more emotionally satisfying explanation, you have to massively overemphasize certain bits of data, and massively underemphasize others, to arrive at the conclusion that its even as likely as the non-conspiracy theory.. That's the very definition of confirmation bias.
Opinions are split among many organizations but considering the politics involved in admitting fault from labs and the emotional satisfaction resulting from keeping the same opinion as before (lol), lab leak is the most likely culprit.
But I disagree with what you said here:
>But do they hold beliefs that are not true about things they don't understand well? (the basic building block of a conspiracy theory)
Facilely, this is a tautology. Everyone necessarily holds untrue beliefs about things they incompletely understand. The scientific method taught to school children is a framework for identifying and removing them. Your statement is akin to "the fundamental building block of conspiracy theories is knowledge gained from empirical observation"
But less glibly, untrue beliefs held by individuals with incomplete understanding are insufficient building blocks of conspiracy theories. The issue doesn't arise from incomplete understanding, nor is it dismissed by efforts to expand understanding. You need an untrue belief, certainly, but you also need to approach that belief with a confirmation bias.