Rationalist org bets random substack poster $100K that he can't disprove their covid lab leak hypothesis, you'll never guess what happens next
Rationalist org bets random substack poster $100K that he can't disprove their covid lab leak hypothesis, you'll never guess what happens next
rootclaim appears to be yet another group of people who, having stumbled upon the idea of the Bayes rule as a good enough alternative to critical thinking, decided to try their luck in becoming a Serious and Important Arbiter of Truth in a Post-Mainstream-Journalism World.
This includes a randiesque challenge that they'll take a $100K bet that you can't prove them wrong on a select group of topics they've done deep dives on, like if the 2020 election was stolen (91% nay) or if covid was man-made and leaked from a lab (89% yay).
Also their methodology yields results like 95% certainty on Usain Bolt never having used PEDs, so it's not entirely surprising that the first person to take their challenge appears to have wiped the floor with them.
Don't worry though, they have taken the results of the debate to heart and according to their postmortem blogpost they learned many important lessons, like how they need to (checks notes) gameplan against the rules of the debate better? What a way to spend 100K... Maybe once you've reached a conclusion using the Sacred Method changing your mind becomes difficult.
I've included the novel-length judges opinions in the links below, where a cursory look indicates they are notably less charitable towards rootclaim's views than their postmortem indicates, pointing at stuff like logical inconsistencies and the inclusion of data that on closer look appear basically irrelevant to the thing they are trying to model probabilities for.
There's also like 18 hours of video of the debate if anyone wants to really get into it, but I'll tap out here.
quantian's short writeup on the birdsite, will post screens in comments
pdf of judge's opinion that isn't quite book length, 27 pages, judge is a microbiologist and immunologist PhD
pdf of other judge's opinion that's 87 pages, judge is an applied mathematician PhD with a background in mathematical virology -- despite the length this is better organized and generally way more readable, if you can spare the time.
rootclaim's post mortem blogpost, includes more links to debate material and judge's opinions.
edit: added additional details to the pdf descriptions.
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The video and slides can be found here, I watched a bit of it as it happened and it was pretty clear that rootclaim got destroyed.
Anyone actually trying to be "bayesian" should have updated their opinion by multiple orders of magnitude as soon as it was fully confirmed that the wet market was the first superspreader event. Like, at what point does occams razor not kick in here?
Basic Bayesian reasoning. Assuming the near-certain and certainly not at all racist (except in the good way of course) prior that any insititution from Chiyeena should be considered a malevolent and incompetent actor, P(LL) turns out very high.
Now one might object that there have been multiple outbreaks of various coronaviruses in the last handful of decades, quite a few of which became or had the potential to become pandemics, and as far as any credible evidence is concerned, all of them were zoonotic in origin. Thus we should, absent strong evidence to the contrary, assume zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2 as the default null hypothesis. However, this postulate is debunked by the fact that it doesn't explain how the commies are evil and out to get us.